citizen of the planet

I am an evolved man.  Or, at least I’d like to think I’ve matured a great deal.  So, just as a result of the way things have been going I’ve sort of been in a funk lately.  I didn’t really realize how stressed I’ve been all week up until a friend suggested it to me.  Heck, that might explain why I felt listless yesterday.  About mid-morning today I somehow got involved in a bit of an exchange with the team lead.  I had to walk away from the situation, so I took my teapot and filled it up.  Instead of letting everything stew for the next few hours I went up to him and asked him for the next task.  Apparently that was enough to break the ice.  We decided to take a coffee break together, and at the Tim Hortons we both just laid the cards on the table.

It was a great exercise for me in terms of maintaining a certain level of objectivity.  I am a person that often reacts entirely based on emotion.  There are a lot of good things and bad things that occur as a result.  On the one hand I’m quite perceptive and have some sense of unspoken things that run beneath the surface.  On the other hand, I have a tendency to take things personally, or absorb others’ emotions without much effort.  So yeah, as much as I’m good at seeing other people’s points of view, the lines between my experience and theirs can be blurred.

So yeah, I made sure to get him to clarify his stances on certain issues, and made sure he understood where I was coming from.  I mean, as much as I’d like to think I’m easy to read, no one is a true mind reader, right?  I can’t afford to leave someone like that guessing as to what’s brewing in my head.  In the end, we both came out feeling much better.   Now, I consider all of this to be quite mature.  I know that an older version of me would have just ignored it all and held it inside.  In the end, it all just ends up as a messy explosion.  By laying it all out, I’m effectively removing any doubt.  In the work place, that’s the best thing that can happen.  At this point, I’m feeling a bit better about the team and the situation.  I can deal with this.

Honestly, when I was first searching for a proper post-grad job back in 2006, I was making a slight effort to get out of my comfort zone and find a job using a language that I had only used in class but not really in the workplace.  Java seemed to be the language that would give me the most opportunities, so that’s where I cast my net.  In the end, that didn’t pan out.  This job found me due to my Perl skills listed on my resume.  The language that I had used for years but decidedly set aside has kept be going for almost 4 years now.  If I think about it, that’s rather fortunate, isn’t it?  It allowed me to get my feet wet in the real world, though, honestly my feet were already figuratively soaked at that point, but that’s besides the point.

Perl, Perl, Perl.

I had to be the jack of all trades.  I was an application developer, interface developer, consultant, quality assurance checker, business liaison, all wrapped in one.  Those were crazy times.  Well, as you know, times change.  I’ve mentioned this before, but yeah, my job was phased out.  That’s never a great feeling, eh?  In the end though, the company decided to hold onto me.  And now here I am trying to get up to speed in Java.  I was actually a little concerned about having to make this change since it’s been many years since I last touched the language.  I think it must have been my artificial intelligence class in 2005.  Seriously.  Over the past week I’ve been feeling better and better.  If there’s anything I should be more concerned about, it’s learning the project I’m on.  Besides the fact that the technology behind the project is in a different language altogether, it’s actually the evolved version of the project I was on before.  The concepts are familiar but different.  It’s blowing my mind.  Also, my job focus has narrowed significantly.  I said that the previous project had me wearing different hats, right?  This new position has one hat, and one hat only.  That aspect kind of makes me sad, but I guess it’s necessary due to the amount of focus needed.

Anyway, I suppose I’m writing about this because it amazes me how I’m managing this transition.  I expected it to be rocky, and it is, but…I expected worse–not only from the job, but from myself.  Am I selling myself short?  Yeah, I am.  However, in this case I was taking one of those “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” stances.  Going from language to language is a scary prospect.  I kind of feel like I was thrown into the deep end.  I guess I knew how to swim all along=–I just forgot that I had the skill.

Some days it’s just all too easy to fall into a state of panic.  Yeah, I know very well that there’s a learning curve involved.  I just need to work hard to get over the visceral feeling of just being in over my head.  None of this should come instantly.  I need a bit more intestinal fortitude, really, to ride out these tough times.  I need to just realize that it’s not like I’m the first person to go through all of this.

Patience.  Courage.

It’s a very good lesson to learn.  As you go through work and life in general you’ll end up building a multitude of valuable relationships.  Even if you end up moving on, to some extent you should try to keep some ties alive.  You never know when those links will become handy.  Now, I’m not saying those links should be exploited plainly for fun and profit, but there are certainly times when your information network can come in handy.

Quick story.  As I’ve mentioned, I’ve changed departments.  As a result I’ve had to relocate to a different floor, away from the main kitchen area where my old desk was located.  The other day I was out for some ice cream with our company’s receptionist.  She informed me that desserts were being served today, Friday, at around 11 a.m.  So, today, prior to 11 I pinged my old colleague and asked him to message me when everything was served.  He did just that, and I was able to scramble downstairs with my eco-friendly plate and get to the food before anyone else had a chance.  Minutes after I got back to my desk, the email went out and everyone ran.

See.  Information networks rock.  Priorities, you know.

The ending was rather anti-climactic, if I’m being honest.  Though, I really can’t imagine the whole thing ending with a big crash boom bang, know what I mean?  All the same, there was all of this build up leading to this date, and now that it’s passed, I’m kind of feeling like “oh, that’s it?”

Hmm.

Well, I guess as of this point I am now something of a free man.  Well, not really, but I have now moved on from my current project.  I can drop everything and start anew.  This chapter is ending, but the new one has already begun.

EPIC.

So, I’ve mentioned that I’m in a transitional period at work, right?  It’s been messing with my mind a little bit because the responsible part of me wants to carry on, business as usual.  The pragmatic part of me has been actively trying to get the new team to take care of all day-to-day things.  Makes sense, right?  Well, this push and pull has been at the forefront of my mind for what’s felt like an eternity.  Every person that I’ve talked to about my situation has told me that I have to listen more to the pragmatic voice.  After all, the new team needs to get used to the workloads that we used to handle.  Now, it seems like I’ve gotten good at pawning off tasks to them.  Like I mentioned in my last post, the client has pretty much kept me out of the loop.  That’s a good thing.  The only thing is, there’s a side effect to all of this.  See, the resulting detachment has left me feeling like my skills are rusting.  I’m not as confident as I used to be that I have a good grasp on the project as a whole.  It’s probably all just in my head, but I can be forgiven for feeling like I have no idea what’s going on anymore.

These days, when I’m asked to investigate something, I do a cursory check for the obvious suspects, and once I have an overview I send it back with an explanation, and a statement of what needs to be changed or investigated.  If the task needs more in-depth investigation, I leave it for the new team.  On Friday night, on my way out, I got a request to investigate a problem that a customer was having with his personal account.  I passed it to a colleague if only because I was already out the door when I received the request.  I thought that would be the last I would hear of it.  The following Tuesday, I was asked to have another look at the problem.  It seems that no one could find anything wrong with the code and left it to user error.  The only thing was, the problem could be reproduced by a customer service person using that user’s account.  It was quite odd.  I thought that perhaps the customer service person screwed up, but when someone I trusted was able to recreate the problem I was stumped.  I pulled up the entry in the database and stared at it for a few minutes.  That’s when it suddenly came to me.  There was a field in the record that should have been filled in with something, which it wasn’t.  Well, God, I was downright pleased with myself.  I filled it in as expected and everything started working.  It was amazing!  At the time, I wasn’t concerning myself with the cause of why the record wasn’t correct, but I was at least comfortable that the one user could finally sign in.  Honestly, it tells me that after all this time I still have the skills for this team.  I’ve been around the code long enough that I can spot this kind of thing.  Though, knowing all that it also kind of makes me sad that it’s all coming to an end fairly quickly, right?

*aigh*

There are two weeks left until the end of the month, which means there are two weeks left on the team that I’m on.  After that point, I’m going to be moved to a different project to do something totally new.  Yeah, sure, I’m excited.  Still, the fear of the unknown is messing with my head.  Ah, but that’s still a while from now and not what this post is about.  For now I’m just sort of reflecting on how the time between now and then is going to be awkward.  I’m the last full-time employee on the project, however there’s a colleague that will remain on for a few more months.  He’s still going at full velocity while I’ve sort of been cruising.  It makes sense because I can’t really be taking on full projects at this point.  Still, the imbalance sort of results in me feeling like I’m rather useless.  The client side people haven’t really been putting much pressure on me, and that’s great, but the fact that I’m now out of the loop takes some getting used to.  At all that to the fact that I have no project manager.  Everything just feels very loose.  I’m just floating on by, know what I mean?

On some level, I kind of think that if everything were to be pulled off like a band-aid (in one swift movement) it would all be easier to deal with.  However, no, this is just a slow burn that’s been going on for many months.  It’s tough.  My only comfort at this point is that idea that things will be over very soon.  Then I’ll be dealing with the a whole new set of problems.  At least it’d be a new challenge, right?  Man….

Oh LORD. When piles of food are available, it seems that I don’t have that much discipline to keep myself in check. This trip has been pretty rough. Because of the group mentality, I can’t really refuse food if everyone else is eating and enjoying. First of all, I don’t want to seem ungrateful. Secondly, I don’t want to seem like I’m above everyone. I could cut down, and in fact I’ve tried that. When I did, when I finished people were still eating and going for seconds. Wow. Afterwards, it seemed like every other person that came into office brought some other food source. Donuts greeted us at the beginning this morning. Later someone brought cupcakes. Someone else brought cookies. The other day smoothies were brought in for everyone. How can you say no?

You know, honestly, going into this business trip I knew that I would have to let my guard down a little bit. There’s just so much that’s out of my control at the moment that trying to force the reality around me to fit within my own parameters would be an exercise in futility. It’s pretty bad. I’ve been obsessing over this and feeling like I’m setting myself up for failure. Well…the circumstances are such that the outcome can’t be great anyway. So, I’ve had to change my attitude pretty quickly. In terms of eating, I have to treat this like a vacation and be conscious, but a bit relaxed. My only comfort at the moment is that this trip isn’t lasting for more than a few days. Soon enough I’ll be back in my own environment and from that point I can do my best to stay on track. A few days of poor choices isn’t going to erase the hard work I’ve put in over the past 8 months. Damn right!